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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,824 posts.
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Effects on the lips of horn players seated too close to the timpani (2014)
Timpani-horn interactions:
2824
How We Knew Space Was a Vacuum (2021)
Question: At what point during the history of science did we discover outer space was a vacuum? I’m pretty sure it was before we actually went there, but when did we know for certain? — MC, Algoma, WI
2825
How to raise a Roman army: The dilectus
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023139 points37 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week we’re going to take a look at the process by which the Romans raised legions in the Middle Republic (c. 290-100 BC, think the age of Pyrrhus, Hannibal and the various well-known Sci…
2826
My favorite coding question to give candidates
A coding question, from the viewpoint of an Google/Amazon/Microsoft interviewer
2827
The False Promise of Chomskyism
Important Update (March 10): On deeper reflection, I probably don’t need to spend emotional energy refuting people like Chomsky, who believe that Large Language Models are just a laughable fa…
2828
Can sanitizers find the two bugs I wrote in C++?
A few days ago I published a short post about two bugs I wrote while developing the C++ external scanner for my TLA⁺ tree-sitter grammar. Reactions were mixed! Many people were supportive, but there were of course the usual drive-by claims by developers that the bugs were trivial, they would’ve found & fixed them…
2829
Why Static Languages Suffer from Complexity (2022)
People in the programming language design community strive to make their languages more expressive, with a strong type system, mainly to increase ergonomics by avoiding code duplication in final software; however, the more expressive their languages become, the more abruptly duplication penetrates the language itself.
2830
When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
In a recent article written for Slate, journalist Dan Kois recounts the shock his younger coworkers expressed when they discovered that he had, earlier in ... Read more
2831
Code Is Not Technical Debt
Someone is wrong on the Internet; he said that all code is technical debt, and I refute that.
2832
The 24 Hour “Do Nothing” Challenge
There’s not too much to say on this one, so I’ll keep it short. My goal was to do nothing for 24 hours. Like everyone in the modern world, I’m hopelessly addicted to little dopamine bur…
2833
Rejected emoji proposals
Proposed emoji that didn’t make the cut.
2834
A brief history of APFS (2022)
Born secretly on 27 March 2017, it was Apple’s biggest gamble. Introduced in High Sierra, it didn’t work on Fusion Drives and had other problems. Also explains version numbering.
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How SerenityOS declares ssize_t
This post explores one of my favorite hacks in SerenityOS. I don’t recommend doing this in your codebase, but it has worked for us so far. :^)
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September 11th That You Have Never Seen
In 2001, digital cameras were a rare commodity. They were expensive, bulky and captured images that were inferior to the organic look of…
2838
German university life seen through American eyes, 1900-1901
Rich description of aspects of academic life from student through professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin in 1900-01.
2839
Fuzzy Finding with Emacs Instead of Fzf
fzf is a popular tool among command line hackers. But if you're an Emacs user, it's hard to use as it requires an interactive terminal. What if you could use Emacs to do the fuzzy finding instead of fzf?
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INTERCAL: Practically impossible
A very good friend of mine has been experimenting with trying to coax Chat-GPT4 to successfully do basic coding tasks. So have a lot of people these days, of course. In an idle moment, though, my friend submitted the following query:
2841
My Little MillionDollarHomepage Garden
Back around the time I convinced my family to switch from a 56 kb/s dial-up modem to ADSL, the website milliondollarhomepage.com was launched, and quickly became an Internet phenomenon, selling pixels for advertising space on a 1000x1000 canvas. 18 years later, the homepage is still standing, proudly displaying the…
2842
Understanding the power of bitwise operators
When learning a new programming language, there is usually a table in the documentation that shows the various operators that can be used with numbers.
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Be sceptical of your own work (2009)
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. (Niels Bohr) If you unexpectedly find a problem solving itself almost effortlessly, and you can’t quite …
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Bringing 19th century ornamental tile illustrations into a 21st century web app
The Internet Archive also archives physical books. The archive’s 2010 scan of a late 19th century catalogue of colourful granite tiles came to my
2845
Building a Signal Analyzer with Modern Web Tech
An overview of the design of a signal analyzer module for a browser-based digital audio workstation built with modern web tech. The post goes over the specific web tech used (things like SharedArrayBuffer, OffscreenCanvas, WebAssembly, etc.) as well as the code design patterns used to build the interactive…
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Tree-Structured Concurrency
For a while now I've been trying to find a good way to explain what structured concurrency is, and how it applies to Rust. I've come up with zingers such as: "Structured concurrency is structured programming as applied to concurrent control-flow primitives" . But that requires me to start explaining what structured…
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Kobold, a new web UI crate with zero-cost static DOM
The TodoMVC implemented in Kobold weighs about 30kb when gzipped over the wire, out of which the gzipped Wasm blob is under 20kb. There are no tricks there . I haven't replaced the default allocator, nor have I minified the JavaScript (although I probably should).
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The Musaicum EU-plus 10M resolution image of Europe
I am pleased to here introduce a new satellite image product that i have been working on for a few months. Development of this has been co-financed by Geofabrik . They are going to offer tile services for web maps based on this image in combination with the Green Marble .
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Optimizing LLMs from a Dataset Perspective
Practical guide to improving LLM finetuning with better instruction datasets, covering data curation, prompt-output pairs, synthetic data, and experiment ideas.
2850
eBPF Networking Techniques – Packet Redirection
This is the first post of a many planned to shed light on the various networking techniques eBPF makes available to a Linux network developer.